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The Myth of Progress in the Arts

“What is progress? In culture, and especially in high culture, progress is the attempt to make something better, which implies hierarchical thinking: if there is something better, this means that there is also something worse. During the Italian Renaissance, artists strove to make things better, to paint better, to build better, to compose better (read Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives of the Artists). In their time, they were modern as a result of their intention to be better, and not the other way around.”

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One comment

Thanks for posting; I never would have seen this article otherwise. Liberals, like locusts, have won so decisively their enemy no longer exists. It’s a 50 year famine that has exhausted itself. The future looks bright in the arts, to me.

It is a mistake to see criticism of modern art as a bourgeois defense reaction against modernity, since the bourgeois society which protested against the impressionists and against Debussy and Schönberg no longer exists.

The comment section on the article? Priceless. William Osborn’s comment sums up how pathetic liberals have become. The authors takedown of him is even better.